Acts of Desperation

by Megan Nolan

I really was happy when I seemed happy. I am incapable of lying about my feelings, it’s only that the feelings have no coherence, are not continuous from one hour to the next.

Being in love was like that to me, a shield, a higher purpose, a promise to something outside of yourself.

Female suffering is cheap and is used cheaply by dishonest women who are looking only for attention – and of all our cardinal sins, seeking attention must surely be up there.

I would not have thought so literally, or so religiously, as to say, ‘Everything happens for a reason’ or ‘God doesn’t give us more than we can bear’, but the feeling was not so different. It was the feeling that each human life has a narrative and a destiny. It was the feeling that misfortune, no matter how great, would eventually serve to lead each of us to our own particular and inevitable conclusion. My understanding was that every action would lead me to where I ought to be ultimately, and where I ought to be was in love. Love was the great consolation, would set ablaze the fields of my life in one go, leaving nothing behind. I thought of it as the great leveller, as a force which would clean me and by its presence make me worthy of it. There was no religion in my life after early childhood, and a great faith in love was what I had cultivated instead.

It was sort of amazing seeing men who weren’t particularly attractive but who believed, more or less correctly, that they could have and do whatever they wanted. I was always calculating with scientific precision the relative beauty of the people I wanted to be with, and would steer clear of the ones who exceeded me too greatly. But then you’d see guys like this one trundling around the world, reaching out, cheerily thoughtless, for whatever shiny thing passed. They didn’t feel the need to strike an equitable bargain, they just advanced towards you, grinning a little sheepishly maybe, and their entitlement was so alien and enviable that it was something like charming.

Being young and beautiful felt like a lot sometimes, felt like it translated to real-world power, but money shat all over it every time.

I valued what I thought of as my free nature, my willingness to do whatever I wanted at all times, my ability to be led by whatever base physical urge was singing to me in each moment. Wasn’t there some truth to the way I existed that those safer people were too timid to follow in their own lives?

Either you can be famous for being a shrill prop in a great man’s work, a victim sacrificed to the gods of art, or you can nod along and applaud.

Mediating your own victimhood is just part of being a woman. Using it or denying it, hating it or loving it, and all of these at once. Being a victim is boring for everyone involved. It is boring for me to present myself through experiences which are instrumentalised constantly as narrative devices in soap operas and tabloids.

How impoverished my internal life had become, the scrabbling for a token of love from somebody who didn’t want to offer it.

I arrived to the dance and it was terrible. The boys were as boring, as childish, as ever. They did not resemble the boys in films, all played by twenty-five-year-olds, I had wanted to impress.

Sex is so wonderful because it is one of the few things in adult life which can completely take you out of yourself. There is a pure singularity to it which leaves no room for your ordinary mind.

I truly was a thing built for use and base pleasure – but not to be looked at with pleasure, not to be beautiful or pristine. And so sex was what I could count on, a definite expression of my purpose.

I felt sure that Dad was going to die. A punishment, I thought. A punishment for ignoring my family; a punishment for needing only someone who could not see me, instead of needing the people who could.

I would have carved his name all over me if I could have, if I thought it would make him happy.

but I believed still that I loved him and that the cheating was a symptom of my innate foulness. I didn’t deserve love but I needed it.

When I was small, before drinking and men and the rest, books were the thing that could absorb me entirely and let me forget myself.

It was already so near to impossible to say no to a man, so difficult to accept the possibility of being hurt or disliked or shouted at. It takes so much out of you to make yourself say no when you have been taught to say yes, to be accommodating, to make men happy.

I thought how full my life and my head had been for ever with these things, with the desperation to be loved by a man, with the idea that a man’s adoration or need to fuck me would make all the bad parts of myself be quiet for ever. I’d thought that a man’s love would make me so full up I’d never need to drink or eat or cut or do anything at all to my body ever again. I’d thought they’d take it over for me.